White House Petition Site Down for Days with No Explanation

Barbara Boland | March 2, 2015
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From Thursday morning until this Monday afternoon, no one could log in to or sign petitions on the WhiteHouse.gov website.

The White House petition site allows citizens to make the government aware of their concerns. The Obama administration has promised to officially respond to any petitions that garner 100,000 signatures within a month’s time.

The process on the petition site is fairly simple: Americans log on to the site, sign the petition, and are sent an email with a link to verify their identity. If their identity is verified, their signature is added to the petition.

This weekend, the emailed link led to this error page:

This morning, none of the petitions that were posted on Thursday had any signatures Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday. Petitions now show hundreds of signatures, all posted today.

No other media outlet had reported on this, as of the time of this post.

Since petitions only have a month to reach the 100,000 signature goal, the four-day downtime the site experienced represents a substantial loss to these petitions.

Although we reached out to the White House for comment, no word on why the site mysteriously went offline, or whether affected petitions will be granted more time to garner signatures.

While it may be no surprise that a .gov site is glitchy, the rest of the WhiteHouse.gov site loaded Obama’s press releases, photos and videos just fine.

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